Death toll reaches 16 at flood hit Kodagu

Madikeri: The flood hit Kodagu district has had a total of 16 deaths as on Wednesday. 

The rescue team is however on a search operation to look through the remote areas in the region and report on the same.

On Wednesday, the team recovered four bodies which was attributed to landslips.

The rescue team recovered the bodies at Hemmathal and surrounding places under the debris of a house which was hit by a boulder in the landslip during the flashfloods in the region.

Authorities said no distress calls had been received in the last 48 hours, and the joint rescue operation is now focussed on screening every house for the stranded.

Appachu Ranjan, local MLA, said the number count of missing people was feared to be around 100, but has come down to 39 as there was confirmation that some of the people had headed to their relatives homes. But, officials said there were only four missing persons cases so far, and there could be more once the operations were completed.

District in charge Minister S.R. Mahesh held a review meeting in Madikeri to assess the rescue and rehabilitation work in progress. A senior official said the focus of the administration was on identifying land to provide temporary shelters to those displaced by the floods. The work of identifying the land had already begun. There was emphasis on providing connectivity to the disaster hit areas and roads were being repaired to facilitate the movement of vehicles to carry out rehabilitation works, the official added. The authorities have also laid emphasis on restoring landlines and mobile connectivity and claimed that the network outage issue had been solved and networks restored.